A selection of my latest work and ramblings. All photographs and other images in this blog are copyright and cannot be reproduced without my written permission and consent. You can purchase many of my works on my Pixels.com Shop. Please use the contact link below or the contact link on my website if you would like to make an enquiry regarding my work. "Painterly": relating to or characteristic of painting or painters. I have several online exhibitions and have published three books of my work.

Monthly Archives: January 2019

I’ve been giving some consideration to what gear to take on my next trip. Currently my first choice for a travel camera is my OM-D E-M5 Mk2. I really enjoy using my OM-D E-M1 but it’s that bit too heavy for my liking as a travel camera. I lugged it up and down hills and all around the streets of Rome in the heat for a week and that proved the point to me.

Lens-wise I’ve decided to stick with zoom lenses and not take any of my prime lenses because one doesn’t miss shots and waste precious time constantly changing lenses. As the vast majority of my shots are landscapes, both urban and rural, my main lens will, as always, be my M.Zuiko 12-40 mm PRO 2.8. This isn’t the lightest of my lenses by a margin but it’s a superb all-round lens with great build quality and matches their weatherproof bodies beautifully and, as such, it packs itself, if I had to take just one lens then this would be it. So far this lens has travelled with me to Malta, Rome, Brussels, Prague and Corfu as well as around the UK and has always performed excellently.

Seven of the eight shots on the left of my main page were taken with this lens, the odd one out being my shots from my trip to Liverpool where I took my 14-150 mm zoom lens.

I’ve decided that I’ve been missing an ultra-wide angle lens option and, after looking around, I’ve gone for an Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18 mm zoom lens. It’s a bit slow (f4/5.6) and not the widest of it’s type but it is, importantly, extremely small and lightweight and comes in at a good price, especially if you can find one second-hand 🙂 and I think that it will be a useful addition for the outdoor landscape shots which are my principal interest.

I’m also packing my M.Zuiko 40-150 mm zoom lens as it is also very light (and equally slow) but I’m not anticipating that this focal length range will be extensively used as I carried my 14-150 mm around Rome and used it for relatively only a handful of shots but who knows what one might find, if i chose not to take one of these lenses to save weight it’d be this one for the above reason. Where the 14-150 mm lens does come in very handy however is for-one camera-one-body type days out and it’s also has the advantage of, like the 12-40 mm lens, being weather-sealed.

I’m going to take my E-M5 Mk 1 body as a backup/second camera. I’ve been lucky to date when travelling and not had any equipment failures but, there’s always a first time. As always weight is a prime factor in my choice of what gear to pack and that is one of the main reasons that the Olympus Micro Four Thirds system remains my system of choice. You can expect to see some shots taken with the 9-18 mm in the near future when I’ve had the opportunity to take it out for a pre-trip test drive.

Kind regards

PS. To help inform my decision making and as a matter of interest I thought I’d see which focal length(s) and also which lenses I’ve taken the most shots on so I used Lightroom’s smart collections feature to crunch the numbers. The focal length was a bit of a surprise as it turns out I’ve used 25 mm (50 mm in 35 mm film terms) the most, maybe not totally surprising as this was the first MFT lens that I bought and I have a soft spot for this focal length going right back to my film days, but nether the less I’d have thought that wide angle focal lengths would have featured significantly higher up. As for my most used lens, no surprise at all it’s my trusty and much-travelled M.Zuiko 12-40 mm. 🙂 . As I expected my longer focal lengths, above 40 mm were well down in the numbers. As an aside, I also confirmed that the vast majority of my shots are taken at f5.6 which is the sweet spot for sharpness on most of my lenses. The irony in this being that my preferred style of painterly work isn’t meant to be biting sharp but one can always loose sharpness selectively, one can’t always get it back if it’s not there to start with.

For fun I thought I’d re-post one of my very first blog posts from 2014, a lot’s happened since then, what happened to my youth?. 🙂

Best wishes

RetroSpektives

A small selection of my 2014 work most of which were taken in or close to my home town of Kingston upon Thames with the occasional foray out to other parts of the UK. I hope you enjoy viewing them, I’ve had quite a prolific year :). I have also linked to larger size versions of the works on my Flickr page. EachRetroSpektiv is linked to my corresponding Flickr Album.

Like this:

I’ve been giving my blog an early Spring clean up. I’ve added a “Selected Themed Collections” section to my site menu with links to the collections on my website. I’ve edited my “Flickr Explored Page” and made a few other graphical updates.

A while back I started getting in to the Op/Tech range of straps and connectors. This is the most versatile system I’ve found to date. With this system I can quickly attach my camera to either a neck strap, hang it from my backpack straps or fit a wrist strap thus:

Figure 1.

Fit the straps to the backpack making sure the male connector end is on the right hand side as you look at it. Connect the uni-loop connectors to the camera with, importantly, the male connector on the left hand side as you look at the camera with the the lens front end pointing towards you.

Figure 2.

Detach the uni-loop connectors and keeps as spares or for use with another camera,binoculars etc.).

Figure 3.

Detach the padded part of the strap and keep the straps as spares or to use with another camera, I used mine for my binoculars.

Connect the camera (or binoculars) to the straps shown in figure 2 with these connected to the padded part show in figure 3 and you have a neck strap or….

Disconnect any straps and attach the camera to the wrist strap. As an added safety measure I like to fit the wrist strap to the camera when changing between the backpack straps or the neck strap so that there’s always at least one strap connected to the camera.

You can even use the straps shown in figure 2 and attach them to the backpack straps and extend the length even further but the straps are already long enough for my needs and the camera hangs comfortably resting on my chest.

Personally I’m enjoying using the camera attached to the backpack straps. The weight of the camera is taken up by the straps and ultimately by my shoulders and not my neck and also there’s one less strap hanging around my neck to get caught up in things.

In use:

Camera connected directly to the backpack straps shown in figure 1.

Camera connected to the the strap shown in figure 2 and the padded neck part shown in figure 3. I leave the straps and padded part connected together and stowed in my rucksack.

Camera connected to the wrist strap shown in figure 4.

I’m very impressed with the quality and design of the Op/Tech gear so I have ordered up one of their neoprene camera cases to replace the one shown above which should be a perfect fit for my Olympus EM-5 Mk 2 and M.Zuiko 12-40mm lens combination. This case has the advantage that it will remain attached to the camera when the camera is being used by means of a strap which attaches to the camera’s tripod screw fitting. They do a range of these cases to fit various makes and types of camera.

I have absolutely no affiliation with Op/Tech, I’m sharing because it might be of interest to someone out there on the Worldwide Interwebnet thingy. 🙂

If you are interested in the backpack shown above see this post for further information.

Like this:

In a day and age when I’ve come to nearly always expect, and generally get, poor customer service from most of the companies that I deal with there are a few shining examples of excellent customer service that I’d like to highlight.

First off there’s Olympus Cameras who very kindly replaced a camera with the latest model free of charge when they could fix a fault. Then there’s Anthropics Technology that were extremely helpful in supplying me with a new software build to try out when I had problems with one of their software products. Most lately, OP/TECH who have kindly offered to send me some replacement Uni-loop connectors as I had a manufacturing tolerance problem with one of them.

I’m extremely happy to continue doing business with these companies and any others that offer the same high quality products and after-sales service.

Like this:

Post navigation

Leigh Kemp BSc. Hons

Welcome to my blog. I work in a variety of techniques and styles including landscapes, riverscapes, abstract and surreal. I hope that you find my work appealing and of interest. I take photographs because I really enjoy photography. I endeavour to create digital art because I LOVE art.

My fascination with computer graphics began about 35 years ago with some software that I got on a free floppy disk on the cover of a computer magazine and ever since then I’ve been hooked. I’ve come a long way since then, the software that I use is now much more sophisticated but my enjoyment hasn’t in any way diminished. I got my first camera at the age of 9, a battered old twin-lens reflex camera which my grandfather “loaned” to me and my first serious camera, a 35 mm film camera, in my late teens.

For me there are only a few things that are of prime importance in a camera and lenses. They have to be small, light, well built, reliable and take well exposed and sharp images. The thing that I most enjoy about photography is finding subjects/locations and imagining how they might look when I’ve had a chance to work with my images. So there’s a sort of feedback loop already going on in my head when I’m looking around and taking pictures.

What the camera sees is one thing what my mind’s eye sees is another thing entirely. What I’m always searching for in a scene are aspects such as perspective, textures, compositional elements and lighting etc. and well beyond that how I can work with these when I’ve downloaded my images which brings me on to processing (hate the term), for me, by far the most important and exciting part.

A while back I stumbled across the perfect description for my type of work “Paintography” some years after I stumbled into it completely unaware that there was such a thing. I guess this is where the photographer in me stops and my artistic side takes full-rein if indeed one can separate one from the other. Put simply, this is the point where I have complete artistic freedom to explore and mix different techniques and open the lid on a Pandora’s box of artistic possibilities, such a large box that even after some years I’m very much still discovering and experimenting with new things.

Please contact me if you have an enquiry about my work or would like to discuss a commission.

New book: 2018 Collection

✈ My website ↴

🖼 Online Exhibitions ↴

Ask yourself, how often do you get an exhibition with no transportation cost, no parking expenses, no queueing to get in, no admission fee and no crowds?!

Well here’s one

and if that wasn’t amazing enough I also have a smaller sister exhibition with additional works :

✈ Paintography

✈ My Photo Books ↴

✈ Follow Me On

✈ Contact Me ↴

Please use the contact form below if you have a comment or enquiry regarding my work.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Subject(required)

Comment(required)

✈ Inspiration

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Steve Jobs

This site, like my website, my online galleries and all my other online activities, is paid for entirely out of my own pocket and I don't receive any advertising revenue. So if you like my work please consider clicking on the link and buying my a coffee.